Membership History

[Upperholme]

Been working with a client on their membership issues. They need to be able to easily find members who have renewed within a date range (e.g. all members who have renewed in the last week). This is actually quite difficult. The start date isn't any good as this doesn't update if the renewal has occurred when the membership is still current. So the only way to find the renewal date as far as I can see is by searching for related contribution records. This strikes me as really user-unfriendly.

If the membership renewal date was logged as part of the membership data then it would be simple to find members by renewal date.

Anyone done anything on this by way of an extension? Any plans to improve core in this respect?

It would also be really helpful if we could display a membership history for a given contact, so that periods of continuous membership and and gaps could be easily identified.

[joanne]

There is a Membership Renewal activity you can search for.   If you have different membership types the type of membership being renewed is in the subject field.

I thought there was a recent discussion somewhere about changes that could preserve a better membership history  but I can;t find it. (Something about a setting the would allow site admins to select create a "new membership on renewal  for all membership" rather then "update the existing membership record if it for the same org" as happens now). Perhaps it was an old topic I was reading.

 

[joanne]

The discussion I was referring to was actually a blog https://civicrm.org/blogs/eileen/renewing-expired-membership .

[Upperholme]

Hi Joanne

Thanks for your reply, and for taking the time to locate and post that link. I had read Eileen's post, and although she goes some way towards addressing the shortcomings of the current state of play, I do believe that a more general solution is needed to improve things for the majority of users.

Eileen's extension, by her own admission, may well not work with 4.5.x, which isn't a great help to me in this case.

Given that membership management is a key element in the core feature set of the product, I feel that the ability to search for memberships by the date a renewal took place (a critically important action in the life of a membership) in a user-friendly manner should be available off the shelf, rather than having to use Advanced search and hunt for a specific activity type. Maybe it's in the roadmap for an upcoming release.